


Guided by a Beating Heart

by glorious_spoon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, But they try, Derek is bad at comforting people, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pre-Slash, Sharing a Bed, Stiles is bad at being comforted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 21:18:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14923031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Stiles didn't exactly tell the whole truth about what went on in the Argents' basement. Derek figures it out anyway. (2x12 coda)





	Guided by a Beating Heart

 

* * *

 

“You lied.”

Stiles jerked, nearly dropped the soda he was carrying, then slammed the door shut and leaned back against it, heart pounding. “For once in your life, would it kill you to use the goddamn front door? You’re not even a wanted fugitive anymore, there’s no excuse.”

Derek rose from the chair where he’d been sitting, all leather and cheekbones and brooding frown, and Stiles was just… he was just so done with this right now.

“No,” he said, when Derek opened his mouth again. “I don’t care what it is, the answer is no. I’m off duty for as long as it takes for every last bruise to heal, find someone else, I don’t care, the answer is _no._ ”

He slapped the light switch, throwing the room into darkness. After a moment, Derek sat back down with a creak of leather and jingling zippers. And yeah, maybe turning the light off had been a mistake, because he could feel Derek’s eyes on him as he crossed the room, set the soda down on the floor and flopped into bed, but he didn’t want to look at Derek’s stupid, scowling, beautiful face just then.

“You lied to Scott,” Derek said again, after he’d judged the silence long and uncomfortable enough. Stiles groaned and dropped his face into the pillow. The deep bruise on his cheekbone ached, but that was nothing on the way every inch of his skin was still crawling, every shift of his clothing like an awful phantom touch even though he’d scrubbed in the shower until he was nearly raw. Classic fucking victim behavior. Textbook. So awesome to get the up-close and personal tour of it. “You told him you were okay.”

“I _was_ okay. I’m fine.”

“I can smell blood on you.”

Jesus Christ, how good _were_ werewolf noses? “Okay, so they knocked me around a little bit, it’s not—”

“Stiles,” Derek interrupted quietly. There was something strange in his voice, and Stiles realized abruptly that this was Derek trying to be _careful_ with him. Something cold dropped into the pit of his stomach. “I can smell it.”

Not just blood, then. Awesome. “Anybody ever tell you to keep your super-senses to yourself? Respect for privacy? How’s that work?” Derek didn’t answer. He swallowed, and when he spoke again his voice came out smaller than he’d meant it to. “Did Scott know?”

“Probably not.” Leather creaked again as Derek shifted. “He’s not— he has the senses, but he’s inexperienced. He wouldn’t know how to put the pieces together. And he’s—” He broke off abruptly.

“Kinda self-involved?” Stiles asked, because he loved Scott, but, well.

“I was going to say distracted,” Derek said quietly, and yeah, that worked too.

Stiles rolled over, slammed his head back against the pillow, thumped his fists against the mattress. That woke an entirely new set of aches that he resolutely ignored. “Why are you here?”

There was another silence, and then Derek said, in that same quiet tone, “Was it Gerard Argent?”

“Why?” Stiles asked again, too tired to be anything but blunt. “Are you going to kill him?”

“If he’s the one who did this to you, yes.”

“Jesus Christ. What the hell is that going to fix?”

“It was meant as a message.”

“For _Scott_ , yeah, I got that part loud and clear.” Somehow, that actually made it worse. ‘ _Nothing personal_ ,’ one of them had laughed in his ear, hand on the back of his neck mashing his face to the floor and his jeans shoved down around his knees, about as fucking _personal_ as it was possible to get. “I decided not to pass it along. Gerard’s out of the picture. We have a truce. If you fuck that up after everything, I’ll… do something violent, I don’t know what, but it’ll suck for you a lot.”

The sad thing was, threatening an emotionally unstable alpha wolf wasn’t even the stupidest thing he’d done tonight. He couldn’t make himself feel afraid. Maybe Derek would slam him into the wall or get in his face or spit threats; that would be fine. Derek wasn’t going to kill him, wasn’t even going to seriously hurt him, and those bruises would be better, maybe. A distraction from the low, sick ache inside him, the handprints on his hips and wrists. He’d be able to look at any marks that Derek left on him without feeling like puking.

Derek sighed like he could follow Stiles’ line of thought, and didn’t move. “Stiles…”

“It wasn’t Gerard, okay?” Stiles snapped finally. “He smacked me around a little. That’s all. There were two other guys there. Hunters, I guess.”

He didn’t need to look over at Derek to know that his face was tight, that his hands had curled into fists and his eyes were flashing red. Two of them. Right. That was a detail he hadn’t been planning on sharing. Not that he’d been planning on sharing anything about tonight’s little hunter soiree-slash-gangbang, so this was all going stunningly to plan, anyway. “Was it on his orders?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Derek made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. Finally, he said, “Are you okay?”

“Peachy,” Stiles said to the ceiling. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re lying.”

“Nothing gets past you, huh,” Stiles retorted, but it was weak. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? I don’t want to think about it. It sucked, it’s over with, I want to sleep for a week and _not think about it._ ”

He could hear his voice starting to rise, and he swallowed hard, fists curled in the rumpled sheets. His head was starting to get light. He breathed in slow across his teeth, counting silently, willing his heart to stop speeding. The last thing he needed after tonight was to have a panic attack in front of Derek fucking Hale.

Derek shifted again, like he was thinking about trying to reach out, but didn’t. “You know it doesn’t work like that.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the last person who gets to lecture me about avoiding my problems.”

The silence in the wake of that had a guilty tinge that he refused to feel bad about. Finally, Derek said, “Fair enough.” And then, “I should go. Let you get some sleep.”

“What, just like that?” Okay, yeah, he was used to Scott, with his soft eyes and gentle affection, Scott, who never would have left him alone if he’d had the slightest clue what was going on. It was good that Scott wasn’t here, because Stiles probably would have started bawling the moment he walked into the room with that puppyish look of concern on his face. Keeping it together for his dad had been bad enough. Derek was easier, because Derek didn’t give a shit about him. Derek was…

Derek was paused by the window, his fingers flexing on the sill, his shoulders hunched. Stiles couldn’t see his face, and his voice was impossible to read. “You want me to leave. I’ll leave.”

Stiles stared at him, them pushed himself slowly upright. Licked his lips, then said, “What if I asked you to stay?”

“You don’t want that.”

“Yeah, right.” His laugh came out jagged and harsh. “You know what else I didn’t want?”

Derek flinched, a full-body shudder, possibly the most human reaction Stiles had ever seen from him. It didn’t feel better the way he’d kind of hoped it would. “God, I’m sorry. Forget it.”

“It’s fine.” Stiles took a short breath, and Derek said, more emphatically. “Stiles. It’s fine.”

“It so isn’t, dude.”

Finally, Derek turned back toward him. His odd, pale eyes flickered over Stiles’ face. What they saw, he couldn’t tell, but something in Derek’s expression softened. He sighed. “You really want me to stay?”

Stiles shrugged, dropped his eyes, picked at a loose thread on the hem of his sheet. “You don’t have to.”

Another sigh, and then the window slid shut. Stiles looked up to see Derek looming awkwardly in front of the window. He hesitated, hands flexing, then sank back into the chair. “Okay.”

“I didn’t mean—” Stiles broke off, then said, “You don’t have to stay there all night, I mean.”

“You said you wanted me here,” Derek said, sounding honestly baffled.

“Yeah, but, dude, I know exactly how uncomfortable that chair is, trust me.”

“It’s fine.”

“You’re such a martyr,” Stiles said. “Just get in the bed.”

“You have got to be joking,” Derek said, flatly incredulous.

This was such a bad idea. Such a terrible fucking idea, possibly the worst idea Stiles had had in his life, at least if you excluded literally everything else that had already happened tonight, but he was constitutionally incapable of backing down even when it would have been the smartest idea, so he set his jaw and said, “You scared?”

“Scared? Am _I_ scared?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “Are you scared?”

“I’m not going to—”

“Jesus Christ, dude, I’m not asking you to nail me while my dad’s asleep two rooms away, I’m literally just offering you half the mattress so you don’t have to sleep in my shitty desk chair,” Stiles snapped, and then he sucked in a sharp breath, then another, and his fingers were twitching, tingling and numb, his chest burning. He could feel the blood pounding in his ears, could hear himself think, with startling clarity, _not now, not now, not_ now—

—and then the mattress dipped next to him and Derek’s hand was spreading over his shoulder, a comforting weight. “Breathe, Stiles.”

 _I’m trying_ , Stiles thought, and it didn’t matter that he knew perfectly well that he wasn’t dying, it still felt like it. Like his lungs would collapse or his heart would explode out of his chest, like there was no fucking _air_ left in the world. “Panic attack,” he managed. “Up. Help me up.”

“Okay.” Derek’s inhumanly strong hand curved around Stiles’s arm, pulling him up until he was seated on the edge of the bed, his spine hunched, elbows braced on his knees, head hanging. “Should I—”

“Just,” Stiles gasped. “Stay. And don’t talk.”

“Okay,” Derek said again. His hand flattened, pressing down, the warm pressure of it through Stiles's damp t-shirt like an anchor, like something that could sew him back into the fabric of reality when everything in him was trying to scatter.

The tide of fear rose up to swallow him whole and all he could do was try to breathe.

* * *

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when it was finally over, leaving him wrung-out and limp.

Derek’s hand was still on his shoulder. He was still _there,_ a blacker shadow in the dark room; Stiles could see the sharp angles of his face silhouetted against the window. He was looking away, his hand moving in slow, soothing, aimless patterns.

“Better?” he asked eventually. Stiles nodded without lifting his head.

“I hate this,” he said thickly, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking about the way his whole body hurt, the beating, the sickening memory of being pushed down on the floor with an unfamiliar body panting and sweating and grunting above him, the way his stupid fucking brain never seemed to work the way it was supposed to—

“Yeah,” Derek sighed. “I know the feeling.”

Well, yeah. He probably did. For some of the same reasons, even. “Sorry,” Stiles mumbled.

“Stop _apologizing_.” Derek cleared his throat, and then added, in a somewhat less angry tone, “Do you… need anything? Water?”

Stiles laughed without even meaning to do it, breathless and dry. “You’re really bad at this, you know.”

“I know,” Derek said, sounding entirely unoffended. “Do you need anything?”

There was a lot he needed, starting with a do-over on this whole goddamn day, but nothing that Derek could give him, so Stiles just shook his head. “Just sleep.”

“Okay.” Derek’s hand lifted from his back, and before Stiles could protest that he was pulling the covers back, arranging the flattened pillow against the headboard. It was so weirdly, incongruously domestic that Stiles almost laughed again. “Lie down, then. Go to sleep.”

“Are you going to—”

Derek didn’t touch him again until he’d already settled his head back down on the pillow, and even then there was something tentative about the way his hand brushed Stiles’s shoulder. “I’ll stay. If you want.”

“Good,” Stiles said, and squeezed his eyes shut. For a long moment, Derek didn’t move. He was just _there_ , warm and solid, radiating an unnatural heat. Finally, he let out a sigh that sounded like it might have contained the shape of a curse word, and bent down to unlace his shoes. They hit the floor in two soft thumps, and Derek stretched out on the edge of the mattress, on top of the blankets. Stiles could hear the small shifts of his body, leather creaking as he moved, the slow, even sound of his breath, steady and safe and unexpectedly comforting.

After a while, he turned onto his side, facing Derek. It was dark inside, but he could see the lines of his profile, his messy dark hair. His eyes were open, and he looked over when Stiles moved. “Stiles? Are you—”

“Don’t,” Stiles interrupted. He reached out from under the covers, fumbling in the darkness until he found Derek’s hand, and slipped their fingers together. “Just… don’t talk, okay? Just stay. Please.”

Derek let out a slow breath. His fingers twitched, then curled carefully around Stiles’s. “Okay. I’ll stay.”

“Good,” Stiles said again, and closed his eyes.


End file.
